Core 2: Driving Biological Projects Our Center currently supports three Driving Biological Projects (DBPs) that represent a broad range of biomedical research endeavors. The DBPs provide application pull and serve as early adopters and evaluators of our technology's utility in enhancing their research. Their feedback is critical in defining the requirements of our technology-development activities as well as in shaping the overall thrust of our engineering efforts. The work conducted by the DBPs is coordinated with the Center's aims by Dr. Whetzel. Dr. Whetzel is in constant contact with DBP groups to learn about their requirements, to suggest how they might take better advantage of NCBO offerings, and to elicit feedback that she can bring back to our development team. The current ongoing DBPs were chosen via a widely advertised open call in the spring of 2008, and will remain as key drivers through August 2011. When the current DBPs terminate in 2011, we will initiate three new DBPs. We have already selected two of these new projects for their strategic importance to our Center, and we will use an open call to select the third new DBP that will start that year. We also propose to add a fourth DBPthe i2b2 National Center for Biomedical Computingstarting with our first year of renewed funding in 2010. Both the current DBPs and those due to start in July 2011 cover a broad spectrum of activities spanning ontology development, management, and evaluation, as well as creation of ontology-based annotations of biomedical data sources and annotation analysis for translational research.